Restaurant Rewind

Restaurant Business Online •www.restaurantbusinessonline.com

The industry’s past is packed with tales of scoundrels and heroes, big thinkers and pinheads, colossal successes and dismal failures, breakthrough moves and self-inflicted destruction. Few soap operas pack as much color and drama. Yet those yellowed snapshots provide insights relevant to the challenges of today. Join Peter Romeo, a 41-year veteran of the business with a penchant for restaurant history, as he explores those pivotal moments from the past.

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Episodes

When Wendy’s and McDonald’s went chain shopping

The restaurant industry has seen more pendulum swings than some clock stores. Right now, the business is in a shrink-the-menu mode, a place it’s been about every 10 or 11 years. Give it a bit, and the trend is likely to swing back to expanding bills of fare in hopes of sporting at least one item for everybody. The same pendulum effect is visible in the portfolio strategies of the industry’s largest players. Chili’s parent Brinker International has pared back its holdings to two brands after oper...

May 03, 2022•9 min

Chick-fil-A’s cow campaign was no BS

Chick-fil-A emerged long ago as one of the highest-volume players in fast food. Now it’s leaving many full-service chains in the dust with average annual sales of $8.1 million per free-standing store. It might have never gotten there if it hadn’t been for one of the more memorable marketing efforts in restaurant history, the iconic Eat Mor Chikin campaign. For 20 years, consumers were urged by a group of rascally cows to spare the herd by having a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich instead of a hambur...

Apr 26, 2022•14 min

Cutting-edge technology is nothing new for Sonic

After seven decades in business, Sonic finds itself once again in alignment with the lifestyles of the times, President Claudia San Pedro commented while being honored last week as the 2022 Restaurant Leader of the Year. In honor of her selection, this week’s edition of RB’s Restaurant Rewind podcast looks back at how Sonic, one of the industry’s older quick-service chains, got its start. Technology played a key role in that birth, and continues to drive the brand’s evolution today, San Pedro sa...

Apr 19, 2022•9 min

Why restaurants are a retirement option of choice for MLBers

Baseball has always had a unique connection to America’s other favored pastime, dining out. The restaurant industry has routinely provided a second career for the pros after they hang up their spikes. Just this week, two-time World Series champion and former Blue Jay Todd Stottlemyer revealed that he intends to open two units of the poke chain Koibito Poke. With the new MLB season underway, this week’s edition of Restaurant Rewind looks at that well-worn path between baseball and restaurants. We...

Apr 12, 2022•6 min

This highlight reel of restaurant fights would make Mike Tyson wince

A corporate raider who once muscled companies into all sorts of major changes is resuming his old activist ways, this time with McDonald’s as his target. Carl Icahn’s demand that the burger giant deliver on promised shifts in its purchasing policies is a flashback to the bruising proxy battles that have cost many a big-name director their seat on a public restaurant company’s board. This week’s edition of Restaurant Business’ Restaurant Rewind podcast looks at three of highest-profile past melee...

Mar 29, 2022•9 min

Restaurants are in the dark about daylight savings

Republicans and Democrats can’t seem to agree on what time of day it is, much less a proposal that would affect every American household. Yet an equally split U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill last week to adopt daylight savings time nationwide for all 12 months. The measure is likely to fly through the House of Representatives and almost certainly be signed into law by President Biden. And why not? The benefits sound as wholesome as parenthood and apple pie—a way to provide America’s hard-w...

Mar 22, 2022•7 min

War seldom makes sense for restaurants and the Ukraine invasion is no exception

As if the world needed more tension, a restaurant group in Europe is trying to calm the hotheads who mistakenly read its name—House of Poutine—as a tribute to the warmongering president of Russia, proving once again that truth is war’s first casualty. But as this week’s edition of Restaurant Rewind attests, this is hardly the only time wartime emotions have driven restaurant patrons a little insane. Conflicts on the battlefield have often spilled onto menus, leading to such craziness as the demo...

Mar 15, 2022•6 min

Long before virtual concepts, restaurants had another way of cracking new segments

In those long-ago days before the pandemic, the term “virtual concept” was as foreign to most U.S. restaurateurs as a selection from “101 Rare Latvian Curses.” Yet today, operations sporting that label are scrambling the industry’s traditional lines of competition. A burger joint inks a deal with one of the many upstart brands with “wings” in its name, and it’s instantly in the chicken delivery business. A brick-and-mortar operation without a hint of beef on its menu is suddenly slinging a lot o...

Mar 08, 2022•6 min

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